Extending the supply chain to address sustainability

In today's growing economy, overconsumption and overproduction have accelerated environmental deterioration worldwide. Consumers, through unsustainable consumption patterns, and producers, through production based on traditional resource depleting practices, have contributed significantly to the socio-environmental problems. Consumers and producers are linked by supply chains, and as sustainability became seen as a way to reverse socio-environmental degradation, it has also started to be introduced in research on supply chains. We look at the evolution of research on sustainable supply chains and show that it is still largely focused on the processes and networks that take place between the producer and the consumer, hardly taking into account consumer behavior and its influence on the performance of the producer and the supply chain itself. We conclude that we cannot be talking about sustainability, without extending the supply chains to account for consumers' behavior and their influence on the overall system performance. A conceptual framework is proposed to explain how supply chains can become sustainable and improve their economic and socio-environmental performance by motivating consumer behavior toward green consumption patterns, which, in turn, motivate producers and suppliers to change their operations.